squirrellypoo

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When it comes to cancellation as social tactic, I am completely neutral, and I will be addressing it neutrally in this piece.

I do not believe, as some social-justice-oriented thinkers do, that “cancellation is not real” or that it is merely “accountability.” People close to me have been forced out of queer and artistic communities because someone with more social power demanded that the collective cut them off urgently and for vaguely articulated reasons, and threatened other vulnerable people with social ostracism if they did not comply.

Often, abuse accusations are not taken seriously, and cancellations don’t do a thing, it’s true — but sometimes, a person is accused of abuse by their abuser, or powerful people bring forward allegations of wrongdoing in order to oust a person who is already broadly disliked in their communities (because they are “creepy” or “awkward” or visibly addicted/mad/neurodivergent), and it does ruin their life.

Intheir desperation to prove their innocence, vulnerable people do things that inspire more intense social attacks — like sharing huge amounts of unflattering personal information, profusely apologizing in a hasty way that can easily be picked apart, fighting and fawning with critics in the comments, making up transparent self-serving lies, fixating on their cancellation to the point of obsession, using substances heavily, self-harming, and various other “sins“ that mostly amount to being publicly distressed.

The mob gathers when they smell blood in the water. And a lot of people on the internet believe that the worst thing you can be is annoying or crazy.

I don’t want to see things like this happening anymore. And so I am sharing my tips for anyone who finds themselves on the receiving end of a cancellation attempt, be it large or small, and would like to minimize the fallout on their life as best they can. I also know that a lot of vulnerable people worry about being cancelled constantly, and I think having a strategy for dealing with it in your back pocket can help quell those fears.

Again, these tactics treat cancellation completely neutrally: for the purposes of this piece, I do not care whether you did something wrong or you didn’t, whether some of the public censure you’re facing is reasonable or all of it is not. My purpose here is to help you respond to what is happening in a level-headed way that does not inflame unnecessary conflict or lead to you getting attacked further, so that you can make your own decisions about what accountability you owe.

What to do if you get cancelled online:

1. Do not acknowledge the call-out publicly.

Responding to the call-out will onlyfurther its spread, and lend it legitimacy. Even if you make a post attempting to disprove the call-out, people will interpret your defensive reaction as a sign of guilt. When you issue a public statement about a topic as fraught as a public accusation, it signals to everyone that something very important is going on, and it makes them curious to learn more, and ensures that the accusations stick more firmly in their minds. Furthermore, posting publicly about your accusations indicates to anyone who bears you ill will that you are rattled and feeling socially threatened. It rewards the behavior.

2. Do not act out of urgency.

One of the ways that cancelled people get themselves in far worse trouble is by spiraling due to anxiety and rushing to issue a statement about what has happened, or to attempt to socially manage public impressions about what has happened.

Do not do this. Anything that you say will be picked apart and used against you by those who are hell-bent on doing so. A hasty statement will not satisfy anyone; it will excite them. The situation is truly not as urgent as it might feel. A lot of times, doing nothing and being quiet is the best way to proceed, and the dust will settle better if you do.

3. Do not issue a public apology.

If you truly feel that you have wronged someone, that conflict should be worked out in private with the people you have directly affected. You do not owe the anonymous public audience a damn thing.

Do not apologize for something you don’t honestly believe that you have done wrong. Do not apologize if you do not understand the nature of what you are being accused of. Do not apologize for how other people are interpreting your actions. Do not apologize to make yourself look better.

No matter how carefully you craft your apology, people will be able to get the stink of PR from it, and will criticize it from a variety of contradictory angles — it is too vague, it over-explains, it centers you too much, it doesn’t own up to your full part in things, it minimizes what happened, it’s just for show, it took too long, it came out too soon to be heartfelt, you didn’t mean it.

Don’t try to satisfy a public that is setting out not to be satisfied. Take time and really think about what happened, and seek the counsel of people whom you trust in PRIVATE.

I wrote a list of 10 tips for the cancelled. You can read it in full for free on my Substack.

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I thought I was done with giffing the teaser but this little hip wiggle has had me in a chokehold.

And then I had a request for his strut immediately preceding this too… 🫠

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I sewed up this teeshirt using some black bamboo jersey and the Loose Fitting Top Block from the “Sew Your Own Activewear” book, then applied white HTV I vectorised and cut out with my Silhouette machine.

The hands motif has been seen on "fans" attending Rockstar Lestat's gigs during filming, as well as been spotted on the "merch table" in the recent Behind the Scenes featurette on the filming of the new season!

For the back of the shirt I decided to use the text from Rockstar Lestat's tour bus, which is... lyrics? I guess?

I added a little VL symbol to the sleeve as a finishing touch, too!

I love that it's hand symbols for "rock n roll"/"devil's horns" (depending on your interpretation) and the British sign for "fuck off". And with the pointy vampire nails… Like, HOW PERFECT for Lestat!

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Lestat de Lioncourt in present day

Gifs by me, taken from the SDCC25 teaser I cleaned up

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One wild night at Dracula's Daughter...

Gifs by me, taken from the SDCC25 teaser I cleaned up

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I went ahead and made an mp3 using the cleaner audio from the video I cleaned up above. I removed the dialogue sections, normalised the audio levels cos those were all over the place, and packaged it up in an mp3. 🎁

The jump cut between the sections is still awkward but what can you do?

DOWNLOAD THE MP3

I have never used Premiere Pro in my life but I cleaned up the skew on the video angle and ran the audio through some de-noise and took a lot of the reverb out. I managed to get it to crop closer with some fancy autofollow feature, too.

I think this is the cleanest we can get right now, and it's gonna be way nicer for me to make gifs and try to decipher the song lyrics from now! (Also maybe now AMC will release a hi-res version now that I've done all this work?? Please??)

Big thanks to Lidi on Bsky for the original SDCC teaser cam!

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Talamasca agents in The Vampire Lestat

Gifs by me, taken from the SDCC25 teaser I cleaned up

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Lestat, drugs, and rock & roll...

Gifs by me, taken from the SDCC25 teaser I cleaned up

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INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE

ANNE RICE | THE VAMPIRE LESTAT | IWTV

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18th century in The Vampire Lestat

Gifs by me, taken from the SDCC25 teaser I cleaned up

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Lioncest - Lestat and his mother across the centuries

Gifs by me, taken from the SDCC25 teaser I cleaned up

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Lestat going to the strip club with his mom and watching her make out with the strippers seems about right.

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I have never used Premiere Pro in my life but I cleaned up the skew on the video angle and ran the audio through some de-noise and took a lot of the reverb out. I managed to get it to crop closer with some fancy autofollow feature, too.

I think this is the cleanest we can get right now, and it's gonna be way nicer for me to make gifs and try to decipher the song lyrics from now! (Also maybe now AMC will release a hi-res version now that I've done all this work?? Please??)

Big thanks to Lidi on Bsky for the original SDCC teaser cam!

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“But Maman, we must see ALL the sights while we are in this magnificent city of Toledo, Ohio, and how could we forgive ourselves if we missed the exceptional skills of Mademoiselle Pingpong??”

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https://twitter.com/iwtv_updates/status/1948742102709370953?t=dd1YBlOkRLLxIfS9TCkdKA&s=19 here is rumoroud Baby Jenks! Do you think she's getting aged up? I can see this actress playing teen with appropriate styling and suspension of disbelief.

Also I have already seen people not liking her being white, which is actually I agree with, especially since she 99% will parallel Claudia in Lestat's mind

!! Thank you for sharing, anon, and I don't think she's getting aged up actually, no. She looks really young in the face to me, and I hope this doesn't sound weird, but given Baby Jenks is 14 and has very recently been pregnant when she's turned / was literally dying in the process of becoming Not Pregnant when she becomes a vampire, I think that her potentially being more mature in certain parts of her body works for the role.

In terms of her being white , I feel the need to clarify that she is in the book and - I hope people don't read this the wrong way either, but I actually kind of think she should be in the show too? If they keep Baby Jenks to her tiny little arc in QOTD (and this is about to be potentially very spoilery, so just a heads up!), raceswapping her could have a lot of pretty ugly connotations. I don't know if you or the people who are unhappy about her being white have read the books, but Baby Jenks is a 14 year old, pregnant drug addict when she's turned. The leader of the Fang Gang, Killer - now likely confirmed to be Bruce, Claudia's rapist - has a penchant for 14-year-old girls in the books (hence the speculation that they've been the same character all along), and he finds Baby Jenks dying in the streets from a back alley abortion and he takes her and he turns her.

Her being Black in that context has a pretty insidious racial stereotype attached already, given the criminalisation of Black girls both broadly and specifically, but it also racialises Killer/Bruce's crime. He's a pedophile, there's no doubt about that in either the book or the show I don't think, but to make him a predator specifically to young Black girls would open a door narratively that I don't think the show's prepared to step through, given it's not the story it's trying to tell.

On top of that, Baby Jenks never meets Lestat or Louis in the books. Lestat's moved by the story of her (and I'm going to circle back to that in a second), but Akasha burns her alive while Baby Jenks is on her way to Lestat's concert. Lestat's inability to reconcile that senseless brutality - because it is senseless, Akasha has no reason to burn this girl alive, and she does so from a distance - is a part of what anchors Lestat to himself during that arc, and to have another Black girl's body senselessly burnt to remind a white man of his humanity I think has really ugly connoatations.

And look, with that comes the reality too that the root of Claudia and Baby Jenks' similarities comes through their burning, but also through the fact that they are the two characters who kill their parents. It's really, really important that Lestat can never do that. He can never kill the mother and father who neglected, abused and assaulted him, no matter how much he wanted to, and I love that about him, just as I love the fact that both Claudia and Baby Jenks can, and do.

To have both of those characters be young Black girls (and again, they're both young white girls in the books), I think has potentially a pretty racist subtext too. You're positioning the three characters who fantasise about parricide as connected, and yet the white man can't do it, while - if Baby Jenks was to also be Black - the two Black girls would be the ones 'monstrous' enough to do it. It would feel really loaded to me as a viewer, and I don't know, maybe others would find that an easier pill to swallow, but I think tying both that power and that specific sort of crime to girlhood itself rather than Black girlhood changes the conversation than if it was only Black girls capable of murdering their parent.

I actually re-read the Baby Jenks chapter of QOTD last night too, and I was thinking a lot about how the show's done quite a bit already to bring their version of Claudia more into line with her, and the parallels are loud and they're there, but in a lot of ways, Baby Jenks as she exists is a midway point between Claudia and Lestat's experiences. She's the point in the Venn diagram where their history meets. She had loveless loving parents who exploited and abused her, and she was a child thrown to the wolves, and - in the show's context - she was likely raped by her maker, and she killed her mother, even as she loved her, and she was burned alive for the act of being born at all.

Baby Jenks isn't just a parallel to the show's version of Claudia, I think in a lot of ways she's a meeting point for that versiion of Claudia and Lestat. She's both their experiences, and neither of theirs, she's her own person, and she never gets to be, because she's killed at the first taste of freedom just as Claudia was at the trial, just as Lestat was by Magnus.

Her being a girl, like Claudia, and white, like Lestat, makes sense to me, and I think it both avoids some of the ugly potential racial stereotypes, but also lets Claudia remain Lestat and Louis' daughter. There are parallels with their stories, yes, but Baby Jenks isn't a stand-in for Claudia. She's just a girl and a vampire who was trying to go to his concert, and Lestat never knows her, he just hears her story at a point, and cares enough about it to write it down in QOTD (and again, I never thought this little story would make it into the show at all, but I love that it is, especially after re-reading it), and I can't wait to see how the show depicts it (and inevitably have my heart broken).

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Soooo Luke’s Scorpions film has finished shooting, and Assad is def in Toronto…

…maybe the reason Assad isn’t going to SDCC is because they’ll be filming past DM while Jam & Eric are away??? 🙏

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PSA:

Ahead of S3 and a possible casting announcement for Gabrielle at SDCC, I’d like to remind folks that the ship name for Lestat/Gabrielle is not “Gabistat” or “Lesrielle”…

…it’s Lioncest.

Because if it’s not from the Auvergne region of France, it’s just sparkling incest. ✨